Dealing with the events of The Avengers
is taking a heavy toll on Tony Stark (Downey Jr.). He suffers from anxiety
attacks, can’t sleep and spends most of his time designing and assembling
various Iron Man suits with differing properties and capabilities. Meanwhile,
the rest of the world is at the mercy of a ruthless terrorist known as The
Mandarin (Kingsley). To deal with this menace, President Ellis (Sadler)
dispatches Tony’s bestest buddy Col. Rhodes (Cheadle). He wears one of Tony’s
suits that’s been painted red, white and blue and dubbed “The Iron Patriot.”
After a Mandarin bomb goes off that puts Happy (Favreau), another of Tony’s
buds, into a coma our hero decides to get involved.

To me, the reason this franchise is so successful is not
that Iron Man and his world saving exploits are so great. It’s that Tony Stark,
as portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. is endlessly compelling. It’s a perfect match
of actor and character coming together to form an individual you can’t take
your eyes off. This, his fourth outing as the billionaire media-darling turned
superhero, is no different. With Stark’s wealth and vigilantism fueled not
only by the crime committed against him, but other deep-seated issues, the
obvious comparison is with Bruce Wayne, particularly as played by Christian Bale in the recently concluded Dark Knight Trilogy. The difference being that
Bruce broods and sulks as if two seconds from slitting his own wrists and
downing a bottle of sleeping pills while Tony is an outgoing and likeable extrovert even though his air of superiority is readily apparent. When the
anxiety attacks begin, he’s truly taken aback. They’re chipping away at his
real armor, his supreme confidence, not to mention what it’s doing to his
relationship with Pepper (Paltrow). For a man such as he, this is a devastating
development. The scenes of Tony trying to come to grips with these most recent
traumatic events and a future possibly more uncertain than when he made his
first Iron Man suit are the best in the movie. He connects with us and somehow,
through all the tragedy and difficulties of his present, he still makes us
laugh.

Don’t worry, even though there are plenty of opportunities
for us to practice armchair psychology, this is no artsy character study. There
is lots of action. It’s all pretty well done, but the most spectacular
sequence, for my money, is the “barrel of monkeys” scene. All I have to say is
13 civilians falling from a plane and just one Iron Man. Later, the scene I
suspect most of you will point to as the most exciting is the finale involving
more Iron Man suits than you can count. This works OK, but is a bit too
cluttered and repetitive for my taste. Don’t get me wrong, it provides some
great visuals and thrills. It’s just a little too much.

Where Iron Man 3 threatens to lose us
is with a bunch of small but easily noticeable problems that snowball into an
issue that hangs over the movie in a bad way. They stretch our suspension of
belief beyond even what's expected of a superhero flick by either dispensing
too much information, or none at all. In the too much department, we know how
far something has to travel to save Tony’s butt. To say it gets there fast is
an understatement of epic proportions It could only have gotten there sooner
if Superman reversed the Earth’s rotation. On the other hand, we get no information,
other than relying on our own knowledge of Tony’s genius, on how this rescue is
even remotely possible considering a trip to Home Depot features prominently in
this occurrence. Most troublesome is how his computer Jarvis (Bettany) is still
able to help remains a mystery. And just where does the Audi come from? I’ll
stop there. Suffice it to say these annoyances take me out of the movie a little at
a time.

In the end, it’s a testament to a character we've become
vested in through several movies that its problems don’t overwhelm
IM3. I hate to keep bringing up Batman, but it’s similar
to The Dark Knight Rises in that things people would
normally destroy a movie for will be dismissed as non-issues due to their love
of the hero and his franchise. I've no issue with this other than to say it’s a pretty good
movie but hardly a great one.